Narthex - Twin Cities
Twin Cities — the never-really-released October 1982 studio album by my early 1980s punk/postpunk duo, Narthex, is finally a commercial release on Skip Heller’s Skyeways Records. It only took 24 years.
A duo of guitar (me) and drums (Dean “Clean” Sabatino, subsequently with the Dead Milkmen), Narthex played in and outside Philly from 1980 to 1983, minor characters in the town’s busy underground scene. We have already told that story a couple of ways. On October 5, 1982, we made our one trip into a studio, recording a live-to-tape set of tunes titled Twin Cities. Other than a handful of cassettes dubbed from our novice mixdown, the session has sat on the shelf ever since. This spring, with a push from tireless Philly music booster, Skip Heller, we pulled it out and got together a crisp new digital transfer, remix and master. Big thanks to Chris Unrath (of No Milk, Baby Flamehead, Gimme, Big Mess Orchestra, Helen Back & the Str8 Razors and so many more), who put this reincarnation together with motherly care at his fine Eardrumland studio. We were at our tightest when we cut these tunes, and now it finally comes through in playback. Hear Dean bomp the womp out of his drumkit while I chop out spiny guitar figures and oddball lyrics on this lost artifact of the Philly underground. Skip has a few words of his own to say about it on the disc order page. Hope you like it… tell yer friends.